Yahoo Site explorer to be turned off

The Yahoo! Site Explorer team is planning tighter integration between Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to make the transition as smooth as possible for webmasters. At this stage in the transition, it is important for webmasters to continue using Yahoo! Site Explorer to inform us about your website and its structure so you keep getting high quality traffic from searches originating on Yahoo! and our partner sites – even from markets outside the US and Canada that haven't yet transitioned to Microsoft systems. To keep things simple, we will share site information you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period.

When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites..

let’s hope that Bing get a download button installed into Bing Webmaster tools before 2012

David Naylor

David Naylor, more commonly known as DaveN, started working in the SEO industry in it's infancy, starting with three major corporations releasing their database driven data, creating internal link structures and improving usability.

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15 Comments

William Vicary - Semto - http://www.semto.com/blog/

Dave,

The words:
“Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites..”

Make it sound like there might still be hope for the backlink data many rely on?

Heres to hoping!

Cheers, Will

AJ - http://www.0-to-60.com

Awwww efff. I love site explorer’s functionality. Why can’t they get rid of Bing…

Craig Mullins - http://www.vacation-rental-wonderland.com/

wow for a minute I though we were losing it after I just went to a conference and they said nothing will change for at least 2 years..

Whats the deal with the 3 tweet buttons up there..

Rebecca L. - http://www.whitehat-blackbelt.com

Digging a little deeper, there’s a link to the post in which it’s mentioned. That post links to an FAQ about the change, which has this:

“We know how much the webmaster community loves the various “explore” features supported by Site Explorer. We are working closely with the Bing team to help ensure that these explore features can be supported when results are powered by the Bing content system, and when available, will be integrating directly into Site Explorer. While the integration is not immediately available today, our goal is to get this integration done for the US and Canada before the end of year.”

David Leonhardt - http://www.SEO-writer.com

*scratches head* How would Yahoo Site Explorer provide Bing with information? Yahoo Site Explorer tells us what pages are indexed from a site and what inbound links. The primary usage is to gather intelligence on other sites, not our own (backlinks of competitors that one can poach…er…flatter through imitation, see if Toolbar PageRank matches the backlink profile of a potential partner, etc.) How would that inform Bing about my website and its structure?

Jack - http://www.diseñadorwebmurcia.com

many websites need yahoo data…. More business down

Jim Rudnick - http://www.canuckseo.com

what David said…and let’s hope that ‘saner’ heads prevail at Yahoo for this upcoming change, eh!

🙁

Jim

Dave - http://www.djb31st.co.uk

Has anyone used the bing webmaster tools recently, lots of flashy graphs that require silverlight and very little data.

It can only be bad for the web community at a hold as soon as M$ get their hands on it and are in full control 🙁

Time to get working on a link crawling project i think!

Colin

> David Leonhardt

One of the main purpose of Yahoo site explorer is to submit your site and verify it with Yahoo.

That is so true about the download button! Without it the entire feature set is severely limited. Want to 301 redirect all your broken pages? Well click through the hierarchy one by one and copy each link…. madness.

[…] replace this functionality and to serve up data when Yahoo! Site Explorer is also retired (currently scheduled for […]

childcare - http://childcare.us

I have used bing webmaster tool, but I did not like it. Yahoo site explorer is much better.

chuck - http://www.cranialborborygmus.com

hi David,
I noticed this post on your side bar. I’m not sure if you can or would want to change the post title, but I think it would be more accurate to add “in 2012” (i.e. “Yahoo Site explorer to be turned of in 2012”) to the end of the title, though you might get less clicks then…
A question that I have though is… Yahoo explorer obviously used to show yahoo links. But now that yahoo results are powered by bing (and bing links), is yahoo explorer now showing you the links that BING is aware of (which would be different than the links yahoo was aware of)?

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